


Face It All Together (We Will Stand)

by luninosity



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Brief Mention of Violence, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff and Crack, Happy Ending, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Michael Fassbender Would Be A Perfect Bond, Possibly At Least One Exploding Pen, Scrabble, So Obviously James McAvoy Is Q
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 10:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Birthday gift for avictoriangirl, who once asked me for a McFassy Skyfall fusion fic. Which is what this is. With some Scrabble-playing, some hurt/comfort, at least one exploding pen, and confessions of love along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Face It All Together (We Will Stand)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avictoriangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avictoriangirl/gifts).



> Title from Adele’s “Skyfall”, of course!

Michael Fassbender, Agent 007, pride of MI6, meets his new Quartermaster for the first time in a museum. He says ridiculous words about a painting and a big ship, because he can’t be his usual suave self, because he’s busy thinking _lovely_ and _too much hair_ and _oh fuck me Scottish accent_. When they stand up to leave, he notices that the boy (is he a boy? it’s hard to tell, with that spiced-whisky voice and those scattered freckles and those ocean-depth eyes, calm on the surface and giving nothing away) is several inches shorter than he is, and smiles like the beginning of the world.   
  
Michael leaves as quickly as possible. He doesn’t need emotional entanglements. Unprofessional. Undesirable.   
  
The word _desire_ follows him home.  
  
The second time Michael meets his new Quartermaster, they’re down in the basements of MI6, and the siren-blue eyes hand him a gun and a radio, and that voice drawls lazily, “Try not to lose them this time,” and Michael still doesn’t know his name, knows him only as Q, beautifully arrogant about his job but with faded scar-lines along one arm, visible when he carelessly shoves up his sleeves, that speak of other emotions buried in the past, old complexities that’re never mentioned aloud.  
  
Michael wants to learn his name. Wants it with an intensity he’s thought long burned out of his heart, in ashes after Vesper and Venice and water of chillingly vivid Mediterranean blue. Wants it the way he once approached missions, before the fire went out and the loyalty became a job and the passion became a duty.  
  
In the after-Silva silence, empty echoing hallways and hushed voices, Q is shaken and resolute, both at once, and he wears a long-sleeved sweater to work and doesn’t push up his sleeves when he hands Michael a new customized handgun. Michael takes a deep breath, says nothing, and returns the next day with a travel-size Scrabble set, and plops himself down behind Q’s desk and starts setting up and makes his first move and then simply waits.  
  
Q plays words like _onyx_ and _ibex_ and _adjustment_. They build on each other’s moves without speaking.   
  
Once, early on, Q says, “Shouldn’t you be on medical leave?” and Michael says “Shouldn’t you?” because it’s true, psychologically if not physically, and Q nods in acknowledgement of their shared truth and then plays the word _qi_ for far too many points.   
  
He tells himself it’s because Q is a good Quartermaster. He doesn’t want to lose such a valuable asset. MI6 is better with Q here than without him; that is a fact.  
  
The first time Michael wins, Q gets up and leaves. Michael spends a split second in sheer horror—should he have thrown the game, he’s not a psychologist, he doesn’t know what he’s doing here—but then Q comes back from the mysterious depths of the server rooms, smiling slightly, and hands him a slim package.  
  
When he unwraps it later, it turns out to be a reproduction of a painting. Of a bloody big ship.  
  
He’s not entirely sure what Q is trying to tell him, but he finds himself smiling back at the ship regardless.  
  
Three weeks after the painting incident, Q is kidnapped. Michael gets the mission because he doesn’t bother to ask for it, because when he gets the alert from M all he says is “Where?” and when M admits they’ve lost the tracking signal Michael doesn’t make a sound and they all know how deadly that silent focus can be.  
  
Q puts together a makeshift signaling device out of his crushed mobile phone and his broken wristwatch and determination and magic, as far as anyone else can tell later. He manages this despite three broken ribs, two missing fingernails, a concussion, and near-freezing temperatures in the room where they’ve thrown him naked. He gives his captors precisely no information about access to MI6, in the eleven hours during which they demand it of him.  
  
When Michael finds him, he opens one blue eye—the other one’s swollen shut—and says, “Of course I knew you would.”   
  
Michael doesn’t cry. He’s seen worse. This, right here and now, _could_ have been worse. They both know as much. But his heart aches, fiercely. “We’re giving you extra self-defense training,” he says. “After you’re healed.”  
  
The day that Q’s allowed out of the hospital, it’s Michael who takes him home. Who gazes awkwardly around the tiny flat, where there’s a painfully obvious lack of personal possessions other than the omnipresent computer parts, tumbling like lively kittens across all the available surfaces. Who stands outside the tiny shower and feels his own hands shake when Q hisses in pain, audible even through the door, the first time scalding water touches raw skin.  
  
There are a few scattered personal possessions after all, he realizes, while checking the bedroom for all conceivable dangers or threats. Some tattered science-fiction novels. A broken bookshelf, with a hammer sitting forlornly next to it, from which Michael cleverly deduces that his brilliant and capable quartermaster can potentially be defeated by wood and nails and the joining thereof.  
  
Fluffy sweaters. A ticket to an upcoming concert by a band that Michael’s never heard of, but which a quick Google search suggests is a massively popular Scottish girl group.   
  
Huh.  
  
He still doesn’t know Q’s name.  
  
His quartermaster steps up behind him, soundless as a cat, and says, quietly, “My sister’s the lead singer, actually, so I’ll thank you not to make jokes about my musical taste,” and Michael says “Too relieved to hear that to make jokes,” and then realizes two things: first, that Q’s just given him the first personal information he’s ever offered up, and second, that the relief is more profound, more all-encompassing, than anything related to trendy pop music.  
  
Michael sleeps on the sofa. Or at least he sleeps on the sofa until Q wakes up trying not to scream, and Michael holds him and doesn’t say “It’s all right” because it’s not, none of this is all right, they’re both fucked up in more ways than anyone can count, but he does say “I’m here,” because he is, and he always will be.  
  
That’s a promise.  
  
“Q,” he says again, and the initial feels too cold, not intimate enough, this isn’t work, not anymore; but he doesn’t have any other name to use, “I’m here. I am here. I promise,” and “I’ll fix your bookshelf in the morning if you’d like,” and “I can be good with my hands in a lot of ways, you know.” All the words he can think to say.  
  
“Don’t,” Q says, and his voice shakes, and Michael feels his own heart break, until he realizes that the pause is only a pause for breath, and the bruised-ocean eyes are attempting a smile, small but genuine, through the pain. “Don’t call me that. Not here, not—if you’re going to fix my bookshelf you ought to know my name, it’s James, um, James McAvoy, actually, so, now you know.”  
  
“James,” Michael echoes.  
  
“Sorry it’s not more exciting. Quentin, or Quincey, or, I don’t know, Quill, like the pens…”  
  
“I like it.” He does. Something perfect about that name. It sounds solid, and true, and right. Like the much-loved paperbacks, and the cozy sweaters, and the word games across a mug of steam-scented tea. Like home.  
  
“Well,” James says, and then stops, evidently out of words, and just gazes at him, the two of them sitting together on the messy bed in a sliver of moonlight, sneaking in around cracked blinds to pour silver across dark hair and pale skin.   
  
James smiles at him, hesitantly, through the light. Michael spends the night in that bed, holding James safely in his arms.  
  
The first day Q’s back from medical leave, Michael lurks around at his side until necessity, in the form of a briefing with M, drags him upstairs. “Go,” Q says, and smiles again, less hesitant this time. “I’ll be fine.”  
  
Michael goes, because his loyalty and his duty and his James all tell him to.   
  
He comes back, twenty minutes later. Q looks up, and Michael says, “Japan,” and Q nods, utterly professional, eyes giving nothing away. “I’ve got something for you, then. Four things, in fact.”  
  
“Four? You’re feeling generous today.”  
  
“I can be very generous,” Q says dryly, “when so inclined. Gun. Radio. Here.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“Also this.”  
  
“It’s…a pen.”  
  
“Honestly, 007. Would I give you a simple pen?”  
  
“…Q. Does this explode?”  
  
“Officially? Officially it’s a simple pen. You use it to write.”  
  
“Unofficially?”  
  
“Unofficially, if you turn the tip like _this_ and then press the top—note that I’ve turned the tip back for now, please—in _this_ particular sequence, you could take out a building.”  
  
“I love you,” Michael says, and then they stand there in complete silence staring at each other for a while.   
  
In the background, one of Q’s interns walks by carrying a dismembered pistol and a silk brassiere. A different person looks up in alarm and then chases after her, waving spare bullets.  
  
There’s still a lot of silence going on, very loudly.  
  
“Right,” Q says, “well, now that you’ve said that, there was that fourth thing I wanted to give you. Before you left.”  
  
“…sorry, are we still talking about explosives?”  
  
“Only metaphorically, I think?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Michael,” James sighs, and that’s definitely James, now, eyes all warm and sweet and hot and inviting, “I love you, too,” and then stands up on tiptoes and kisses him, squarely on the lips, not afraid of anything at all.  
  
The sound of the spare bullets being dropped in shock behind them barely even registers.  
  
“I have to go to Japan,” Michael says. “And then I’m coming back. I’m coming back to you. Every time.”  
  
“Of course you do,” James says. “And of course you are. And I’ll be here. Every time.”


End file.
